Ireland: Failures in the Present

Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, continues his new object-based history. Taking artefacts from William Shakespeare's time, he explores how Elizabethan and Jacobean playgoers made sense of the unstable and rapidly changing world in which they lived.

With old certainties shifting around them, in a time of political and religious unrest and economic expansion, Neil asks what the plays would have meant to the public when they were first performed. He uses carefully selected objects to explore the great issues of the day that preoccupied the public and helped shape the works, and he considers what they can reveal about the concerns and beliefs of Shakespearean England.

Programme 7. IRELAND: FAILURES IN THE PRESENT - A rare woodcut offers a equally rare visual impression of the troubles and tragedies of Elizabethan Ireland.

A Dangerous Image of Ireland

Why is it that Shakespeare gave us a Scottish play, and Scottish and Welsh characters in abundance, and yet in his entire works there is only one Irish character?

The answer has much more to do with national politics than artistic inspiration. The war in Ireland was the great military crisis of the Elizabethan regime – almost resulting in failure for England – and as a result it was a topic prone to censorship.

While we can glean a lot about the issues presented by Ireland from the many references in Shakespeare’s plays, this book, The Image of Ireland, published in 1581, perhaps allows us best to reconstruct what his audience might have known and thought about the Irish.

And if you’re still wondering who the one Irish character is, then you’ll have to listen to the programme…